High-Resolution Balanced Microwave Material Sensor With Extended Dielectric Range

This paper proposes a new design method to achieve adverse-resistant microwave sensors using balanced structure of two sensors. Any kinds of sensors can be used in the presented balanced architecture. However, a new kind of high-resolution microwave material sensor, based on the injection locking phenomenon, is presented and used in this paper. By injecting a low-power level and low-phase noise signal to an oscillator, an injection-locked oscillator with a very small lock range is achieved with a very high sensitivity to its resonator condition. In the balanced structure, for a standard sample over one branch and an arbitrary sample over the other, the difference between center frequencies and lock ranges of oscillators can be measured at once. Therefore, the dielectric constant and loss tangent of unknown samples are calculated while the adverse environmental variations have the same effects on both branches and are compensated automatically without additional sensors and environmental controlling system. Moreover, it is indicated that using a simple frequency comparator with an output voltage instead of a spectrum analyzing system makes the system more practical and low cost. As an example for validation, a system is fabricated at 1 GHz and results of various states have been presented.